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Top 1% Got 93% of Income Growth as Rich-Poor Gap Widened in U.S.
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of San Francisco Chronicle/Bloomberg News


San Francisco Chronicle/Bloomberg News, October 2, 2012
Posted: October 16th, 2012
http://www.sfgate.com/business/bloomberg/article/Top-1-Got-9...

The U.S. has gone through two recoveries. The 1.2 million households whose incomes put them in the top 1 percent of the U.S. saw their earnings increase 5.5 percent last year, according to estimates released last month by the U.S. Census Bureau. Earnings fell 1.7 percent for the 96 million households in the bottom 80 percent -- those that made less than $101,583. The recovery that officially began in mid-2009 hasnt arrived in most Americans paychecks. In 2010, the top 1 percent of U.S. families captured as much as 93 percent of the nations income growth, according to a March paper by Emmanuel Saez, a University of California at Berkeley economist who studied Internal Revenue Service data. The earnings gap between rich and poor Americans was the widest in more than four decades in 2011, Census data show, surpassing income inequality previously reported in Uganda and Kazakhstan. The notion that each generation does better than the last -- one aspect of the American Dream -- has been challenged by evidence that average family incomes fell last decade for the first time since World War II. In this recovery its proved better to own stock than a house. For stockholders ... the value of all outstanding shares has soared $6 trillion to $17 trillion since June 2009, the recessions end. Even after a recent rebound, the value of owner-occupied housing, the chief asset of most middle- income families, has dropped $41 billion in the same period, part of a $5.8 trillion loss in home values since 2006.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on income inequality, click here.


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